I guess my goal is to stay lean as I am now, but get more muscle. I feel that my leanness is right where I want it, but haven’t been gaining muscle (in my eyes).
To be honest, I don’t want to gain back the fat, but is that inevitable if I want to gain muscle? Will the extra carbs added from Surge go straight to muscle or to fat and muscle together?
As far as my carbs schedule, they do come from FiniBar, then breakfast, Lunch not many, snacks are yogurt and Metabolic drive always (not a ton of carbs) then supper is lean protein with rice.
The reason for the first quote is tied to the second one. It’s an all too familiar trap: we all want to go to heaven, but none of us want to die. In the pursuit of muscular gain, SOME ab blurriness needs to occur.
You owe it to yourself to read Chase Karne’s “how to stay small and weak”
By being this lean, you’ve already demonstrated that you HAVE the skillset necessary to get this lean: now all you need to do is spend some time focusing on getting bigger before you employ that skillset again. But trying to hold onto that leanness while building just plain isn’t going to work. A VERY lean body is honestly not in a good place to gain muscle: some softening up needs to happen to create a state that is primed to grow.
I’m honestly a “no carb” guy, so I can’t really speak to what the extra carbs will go to. Their purpose is to provide you the energy necessary to train VERY hard: Surge is a training fuel. But if you’re currently not gaining muscle OR fat, that speaks to a lack of energy being consumed.
The body NEEDS energy to build tissue. That energy can come from dietary fat or carbs, but either way, building tissue is a metabolically expensive process. Without energy, NO tissue gets built. With adequate protein and hard training, we can vector MORE of that tissue toward muscle than toward fat. But without the energy, nothing is getting built.
I’d save the money on the Advocare and buy more Surge. Outside the caffeine, the preworkout you’re using is essentially an incomplete multivitamin that occurs little to nothing (as a preworkout).
I think the mantra here is “some before, most during, the rest after”. I start sipping as I walk into the gym and finish right around my last set; I’ve found that’s what works best for me.
Ditto to the above. They’re really two separate products. Creatine has a host of benefits, but for workout performance we’re talking mostly ATP and some muscle cell hydration. You’ll usually need to take it daily and it doesn’t matter when.
Surge Workout Fuel is about energy, blunting cortisol production, hydration, and a handful of goodies that improve short-term performance. You take it specifically for and during your hard training sessions.
Yeah. And I’d say follow the instructions where you take some preworkout, let it percolate for 10-15 minutes, and then the rest during your workout.
From what I’ve read, it really shines for highly active constant movement type workouts, like Crossfit workouts. Apparently it’s second-to-none for that kind of work.
But my experience is that it works really well to get through a long workout of lots of sets of heavy presses and deadlifts. Towards the last sets, it just provides extra fuel to power through. This is a silly analogy, but it’s more like diesel fuel than rocket fuel; when you need to switch into that extra gear, it provides the power.
